Tying Loose Ends I
by bhut
Summary: Tying loose ends of Primeval season 3 - what has happened to Jack Maitland.


**Paying old debts**

_Disclaimer: All characters belong to Impossible Pictures_

The woman dressed in a uniform of the ARC's medical staff was walking nonchalantly through the ARC's medical wing, almost humming some sort of a tune under her breath. All around her various people hustled and bustled in different directions, all busy with something or other, some sort of a medical emergency or something else entirely. At any rate, nobody noticed the ARC member, for whenever they did visit the general hospital, they tended to keep to themselves and take care of their own in whatever way their management thought necessary. And thus, they never took much notice of the woman, or her characteristics, or the fact that she walked into Jack Maitland's room.

Inside, the teenager was lying like the battered husk of the megaopterans' plaything that he had been in the future, with half, or even two-thirds of his head, wrapped up in bandages, along with the bigger half of the rest of his body. Various machines and intravenous feeds were sticking from the places that weren't bandaged up, but Helen Cutter, whom this woman undoubtedly was, knew that the teenager will never get better or healed from the futuristic beetles' bites: too much of his internal organs, including the brain, have been ravaged by the megaopterans' poison and digestive fluid.

Still, one man's loss was another's salvation, and so Helen Cutter bent the bandages away from Jack Maitland's skull and pulled out a medical syringe full of viscous, shimmering, metallically blue liquid right behind Jack's bandaged up ear.

* * *

"Ah, Mr. Maitland, I'm so glad that you're back among the fully living," James Lester's voice just oozed with barely concealed sarcasm, but the tall teenager sitting on his hospital bed just ignored him, staring, apparently, at the closed doorway to his room. "You are fully back, aren't you?"

"I remember it all," Jack Maitland said in an emotionless, yet physically unsteady, vocal tone. "I remember them all – flightless gray bats from the future."

"Yes, and there were also flying flesh-sucking beetles from the future as well," Lester agreed easily, but then got back from where he had started. "Anyways, I came here first to tell you that you're in trouble-"

"Do I know you?" Jack Maitland may have regained consciousness, but his awareness of surroundings clearly wasn't up to par with normal healthy people. "We met before or not?"

"The name's James Lester, and no, we haven't met when you were truly coherent," the government worker shook his head. "Anyways, Mr. Maitland-"

"I have a name. Call me that."

"Fair enough – Jack," Lester began to feel rather uneasy under the teen's somewhat cyclopean stare. "As I was saying, you're in trouble. Abby's rather mad at you at your initiative, and then there's the fact that you have interfered with her Majesty's affairs." Lester paused, waiting for a response, but Jack just kept silent and staring at the older man in a somehow disturbing way.

"Anyways," Lester went on, "after a brief discussion back at the center, we decided to give you a job out of London with a non-disclosure clause. You seem like a bright lad in no hurry to go to jail, so-"

"I don't think I like you, Lester," Jack suddenly spoke, abruptly cutting-off the older man. "I don't like being coerced either. I will be a man of my own destiny – I will. I don't think that you have a happy family life, I don't-" suddenly he grimaced and grabbed his head. "Can you leave now?"

"Yes – yes, I think I will," Lester said, blinking, as the teenager once again started to ignore him, returning to his withdrawn state of being, "but we will be talking about this later, once you get better – hopefully, you will."

He hurriedly turned around and left, ignoring in his customary way the nurse who went into Jack's room just as he was leaving it; in fact, due to the specifics of his mental processes, he never even noticed her...

* * *

"Young man, are you decent? For I am coming in, whether you're ready or not!"

Upon hearing this voice, Jack straightened, and there was something rather different in his posture, something completely new and sane. "Helen," he spoke, and his voice sounded rather different as well, "I remember it all: I died – for you."

"Yes, but I am not... whoever or whatever you think that I am, not quite," Helen said calmly, as she sat down on the chair recently vacated by Lester and pulled out a hand mirror. "Can you please take bandages off your face? There's something you need to see."

"I do?" Jack-slash-Stephen said yet complied, looking at himself in the mirror. To his surprise, in place of a ruined eye socket there was now just normal flesh and an eye – but not Jack's brown eye, but Stephen's much darker one.

"I managed to save you – well, your bio-genetic material, to be precise – in the past and have downloaded into a futuristic nano-tech computer, so to speak."

"And then you killed this boy."

"No. The boy was already dead – the megaopteran's poison and digestive acids have destroyed one of his eyes, caused a massive haemorrhaging in his brain, ravaged his body. The nano-tech that contained you has fixed the physical damage as well as began to re-write the body's genetic code. By the end of the week, you won't be Jack Maitland, but your own person, complete with a passport."

"But not Stephen Harper either. In that... I am dead."

"Yes. Here's a clean passport for you, as well as some other ID papers," Helen pulled them from under her nurse's uniform disguise. "A fresh set of clothes in your hospital drawers as well."

Stephen-slash-Jack nodded and began to pull the clothing out of there. "Helen, I-"

"Stephen, please. We know that I am still in your debt...but I am not dead and out of running just yet."

"You'll outlive us all."

"Don't be too sure. I may have mastered the art of chronological cloning, but dying... it still hurts."

"Helen, I don't know what and how, but-"

"Don't, Stephen, please don't – just don't," something glimmered suspiciously like a tear in a corner of one of Helen's eyes. "For now at least our paths must part."

"Fine, but can I at least take you for a walk?" By now Stephen was fully dressed, with Jack's hospital clothes lying discarded on the bed. "We- you and I-"

"Oh Stephen," Helen flashed him a smile, so rare those days, "you were always so gallant; if only-" she fell silent, her eyes now definitely glittering with moisture, and silently left with her ex-lover, her hand in his grasp.

Behind them Jack Maitland hospital clothing, complete with a name tag, lay discarded, unneeded, unnecessary for ever more.


End file.
